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Eric Dayton, Philosophy Faculty

Journal Submissions

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As a journal editor, what do you see as common mistakes that people make with their papers?

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The commonest failing is-- [it] can't be called a mistake exactly--is to be arguing for a position, which is either ambiguous or the student knows a certain small literature that points to this as being the central topic in the larger area of Philosophy in question, but then doesn't realize that there's already a rich literature that won't have come up on a Google search because it's a slightly different topic, but it's actually the more central one and so on. Those are the kinds of things you just learn by becoming a better philosopher. I would say that the... Geez, I...You know, it's hard to know. We do get a lot of PhD students writing--submitting--articles to 'Dialogue' and some of them are very good but frequently even the very good ones are... They don't have enough breadth. They don't see the location of the topic in question in the larger picture. I think that's probably the most... the hardest thing for people to get right.